Instructor: 'These computational skills will be valuable for them whatever profession they go into'

According to officials, teaching kids the language of computers at an early age can open doors in the future which may not exist yet. WLWT's Todd Dykes recently visited two schools in Greater Cincinnati where students are talking about technology in an innovative new way. At Piner Elementary School in southern Kenton County, Principal Christi Jefferds has started an after school coding club.

Connecting kids and computers: Learning to code

Instructor: 'These computational skills will be valuable for them whatever profession they go into'

Using online guides created by code.org, Piner students are learning how to tell computers what to do.

"I had a club because I thought this is for those kids that want to take it to the next level," Jefferds said.

The first challenge is helping students understand what coding is all about.

"I know they all love computer games," Jefferds said, "And I think they would really like to find out what it takes to create something like that."

Brad Wethington, whose son is part of the Piner Coding Club, is a computer programmer by trade.

"You have to be a logical thinker to be a success at it," Wethington said.

Wethington loves that his third-grader is learning a language which could one day help him land a high-paying tech job.

"It will make it light-years easier for him," Wethington said. "He'll breeze through it so quick, all these kids will. It's putting the fundamentals that I had to wait until college to learn in them now, at such a young age. They're only going to grow even further."

The process of creating young tech-innovators is also underway in Cincinnati's West End.

Michael Beck and Mark McFadden have worked with computers for years.

"I work for a local company here downtown. I program for a living," McFadden said. "I've always been interested in seeing young people learn at a young age knowing they've got the abilities. These young people can learn computational skills."

During the 2014-15 school year, they volunteered their time to teach students like Iyanna Harris at Hays Porter Elementary School.

"It's kind of, like, you know, helping us how to understand computers, how we can do our homework and how we can do math games so we can understand," Harris said. "And it's helping us really a lot."

"At the early stage kids are still curious so they're asking a lot of questions," Michael Beck said. "They want to know why certain things are happening and how they can do it. After that they become users and they're not really interested in how it works, they just want to use it. So what we try to do is catch them early on to make them creators. So they are interested in how things work and they're going to be interested to build it themselves, create it themselves."

Beck continued, "So in addition to using a game, they should be able to create a game. Instead of using an iPhone, they're going to ask themselves the question how can I create an application for iPhone and do something with that?"

Beck said it's critical that students understand what's behind the screens they interact with on a daily basis.

"The key for us is for them to discover what the computer can do for them."

Like students at Piner Elementary, interested students at Hays Porter Elementary use software created by code.org.

Mark McFadden says knowing how to tell computer characters which way to move and when can foster a child's sense of logical thinking.

"We do steps all the time," McFadden said. "You think about getting up in the morning and getting dressed, getting ready for work or school, wherever you may be going. There are processes, there are steps you need to take. You don't think about it because you know what they are."

McFadden said learning how to program a computer is basically the same thing.

"You're telling a computer system what to do, step by step," McFadden said.

And it's knowledge that could pay off in a big way, especially in Greater Cincinnati.

"We have a large programming community, a large technical community in Cincinnati," McFadden said. "It's really a nice, high-tech sector that it's becoming. So the talent's there, the ability is there. It's just, do they know that they can do it?"

According to code.org there are more than 18,128 open computing jobs in Ohio, but only 1,367 computer science graduates.

That may be changing because code.org says Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana are three of only 25 states where computer science courses can count toward high school graduation.

Regardless of the kinds of careers students at Hays Porter and Piner ultimately embrace, McFadden encourages all young people to learn the basics of computer programming.

"These computational skills will be valuable for them whatever profession they go into," McFadden said.